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Wake-up Call: Democrats could easily lose the White House and Senate next year
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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politics
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Imagine thinking that Trump is in any way, shape, or form, better for you and your family than Biden.
Conservatives and Republicans: hate working class people, hate people that rent, hate minorities including women, want to privatize every last piece of American society so you'll have to subscribe to your alarm clock and appliances.
It's the illusion the maga crowd clings to. They think the economy was better under Trump and they think that relates to prosperity for them. The truth is that the economy really only indicates how the market is for the wealthy. But they don't see that. Trump, like nearly all GOP, is fully prepared to strip mine this nation of all resources possible, which would me amazing for the economy. 🙄
Trump prints trillions of dollars. Loses election, then blames biden for fixing his mistake.
It's fucked..
Welcome to every election cycle since Regan. Repubs fuck the economy and blame the Dems for trying to fix it.
I generally agree except I think Bidens secretary of treasury screwed the pooch by not borrowing more longer term debt at low interest rates. So now we're paying 1T per year in interest.
The whole system is completely fucked right now.
I don't understand how they can possibly put Biden forward again. He's well past losing his marbles. Way too old to run imo. It's disgraceful.
Isn't Trump in the same boat? Trump's 77, Biden's 81. One may easily argue they're both much too old to be running.
Neither of them represents an acceptable choice to lead a party. That's kind of my point.
If these are the only two viable candidates then something is completely broken and needs to change.
That's what we get with a two party system. The parties don't really need to compete through better policy, simply spending more and being marginally less bad in the eyes of the voters on your side of the line is enough of a strategy for them.
If 3rd parties were viable, democrats would actually have to compete in the ways that matter, and we wouldn't see shitty politicians like Biden as much.
But we're not going to get that until election reform (STAR & Approval voting, ban on money in politics, etc) happens.
Gaetz talked of banning money in politics. This could have been an easy win for Dems by taking him up on writing that legislation. Interesting that they chose not to pursue the one issue everyone in the US agrees on.
So I'm supposed to vote for the genocide supplier?
And Democrats are not doing this?
Like it or not we are stuck with a two party system. As fucking awful as Biden is, and he is, Biden is the lesser of two evils by far. And that applies to democrats/republicans as a whole.
Both parties/candidates are to some degree cool with genocide and privatization, but only one of the two stands out as the worst, and the worst by a lot.
Don't like it? Vote for local candidates/congressional candidates in primaries that will fix the two party problem. But in the mean time the better presidential option will be anything with a D next to their name.
I will not vote for the party of genocide supply. Aka the dems.
Local candidates are not going fix the two party system. That's a national issue.
I don't know the solution, but buying into the Dems bullshit "lesser of Two evils" AGAIN is not it.
Have fun being the same chump you were 8 years ago.
You want to ever vote again? Then take a long, hard look at what each party is trying to do about voting rights. If you want to stop genocide, a Republican in office is the worst-case scenario for you; and there is a non-zero chance that voting against Democrats in 2024 means that 2024 will be our last real election ever, after which the genocide would come across the ocean.
Think about the worst case scenarios here—in case of a blue wave, the worst case is another four years of lackluster governance and pretending to keep our hands clean of the worst stuff happening in the world, while winking at corporate greed and doing nothing about climate change. Not a great outcome.
In case of a red wave, we don't have to guess about the worst case, because Trump is telling us what he'll do: make anything but Christianity illegal, militarize the borders to turn away refugees, curtail the first amendment, hand Ukraine over to Russia, help Israel glass Palestine, make it harder (impossible if he can manage it) for people to vote against him, try to get an extra four years as penance for what he sees as a "stolen" election, retaliate against anyone trying to hold him accountable for his crimes, roll back environmental protections that will make climate change irreversible, nominate perhaps another SCOTUS justice who's even more unhinged than the other three he installed, and vague threats of violence toward everyone who isn't straight and cis. That is all stuff that he has promised to do at his rallies. And all of that isn't even touching on the financial disaster that his tax policies actually unleashed between 2016-2020, and the regular horror of mass shootings and white supremacy that goes up under every pro-gun president, but Trump in particular. Not a survivable outcome.
This isn't a normal election. Giving Trump (or, at this point, any Republican) a chance is off the table. He's shown us and told us what he'll do if he gets the White House again. If you want to vote third party to send a message, you have to contend with the possibility that there won't be anyone left to hear it in 2028. Yes, people's lives are on the line. So don't let Republicans have the chance to step across that line.
Replace evey year you listed with 2012.
And replace trump with George w Bush.
These were the same arguments being made by Dems back then. I voted. And we still have genocide supply. The genocide we have now is unacceptable. Just because there is potential for it to get worse don't mean I should accept they situation we have now.
Biden cut check to Israel with a smile on his face. So will the republican party and so will future democrats. None of them will be getting my vote.
You're a genocide apologist when you vote blue.
That's not what they said in 2012 (a year when Bush wasn't even on the ballot, by the way). I've been alive for ten presidential cycles, and I've never seen it this bad before. I've never seen a candidate with such blatant disregard for democracy, or voters who are so blithe about tossing away their voting rights.
But even if they said it then, it doesn't preclude it from being true now. Things can get worse over time. A threat narrowly defeated in one year doesn't prevent that threat from gaining power and causing more problems a decade later, and the GOP has undoubtedly gotten worse over the last thirty years.
Ad hominem nonsense aside, your comment would've sounded somewhat reasonable in 1996, but in 2023 I don't think it is. If you see the danger but run the other way, aren't you treating the many more lives that would be lost as a result of a second Trump presidency with the same clinical disconnection that the Democrats are treating the Palestinian lives lost with each shipment of arms?
It's literally the trolley problem. You want to not be the one pulling the lever. That's fine. But the point of the trolley problem is that there's not a morally correct answer. It's a terrible situation, and there's no right way to respond; but lambasting others on the internet for their choice is definitely the wrong way.
You are right it was in 2000. That was a long time ago.
Anyways here's an article talking about black voters are " choosing the lesser of two evils" when voting for Gore. Remember how that turned out?
If I remember correctly gore got more votes but Bush still won because his brother was the governor of Florida or something...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/10/29/some-black-voters-view-gore-as-the-lesser-of-two-evils/875026c6-d3d7-4076-ae3d-db858cb0270b/
Thinking that abstaining to vote washes your hands of association is not correct. Your abstention counts as a vote for the winning party, whether you like it or not.
Choosing to continue to participate in the social fabric is supporting the choices made much the same as casting a vote. You're paying taxes, you're collecting incentives, you're participating in the economy, you're enabling the growth of GDP.
By your own logic, assuming you're an American citizen and not just a troll, you're also a genocide apologist who's enabling whatever party wins.
They're both supporting the ongoing genocide. This isn't helpful for deciding who to vote for.
Which is why I specified local/congressional. It's going to take all levels of government to unfuck us from a two party system.
Only one of these choices is actively trying to turn our country into a theocratic hell hole.
The "lesser of two evils" is fucking awful, but it's true.
If you can't talk about politics without resorting to personal insults then you must know how weak your argument is.
You are the one deciding between the two only, not me. I will vote for a candidate that has a platform I can support and nothing else.
The dems continue to get elected because of the Two party system. They aren't going to change it.
Let me know when it does tho....
Yes, and the other will happily participate in genocide, be unable to create real change in Any area I care about and then pretend they are the party of moral superiority.
You vote blue you will still have red on your hands.
And in doing so you'll waste your vote, allowing the worst possible option (Trump) to get voted in.
Establishment democrats won't let it happen, but they can't do shit if they don't get elected, and actually good candidates get elected instead.
Which means all levels of government are involved. And this issue needs to be fought in the primaries as well.
There will be red on everyone's hands no matter what. No matter who we choose, our tax dollars are going to genocide.
The least we can do, the bare fucking minimum is to reduce the amount of red.
You'll have just as much red on your hands as I do. But the difference is that you're willing to let it be more red.
Oh get the fuck outta here, that's not the only issue at stake
The GOP also continues to get elected because of the two party system. There's a much better shot at taking over the Democratic party to force reform through than will ever happen with the GOP. I want to vote third party, but I'm not going to pretend that it's safe to do so yet at the level of president.
The presidential race is the LAST place you should be making your stand. It's like you want to skip all the early levels of the game (local and state elections) and jump straight to the final boss without realising you won't win this game by doing that.
I refuse to play rigged games. And so should you.
Have fun having an even more genocidal Trump presidency then, idiot. Third parties can't win mathematically.
What if everybody took the same stance as me?
What if all the people telling me to vote lesser of two evils, voted independent?
Does the math line up then?
Maybe your the problem. Have you ever considered that?
If everyone did that we would have a solution.
The reality is that with the current balance of power that will never happen.
It not that I don't wish for it to happen, but even if two people here agree there's no way we are going to take 70 million votes away from each party equally to guarantee neither can beat the third party.
We have one path: get more young people who aren't batshit crazy into both the Senate and the House until we can force campaign finance reform, ban all of the should-be-illegal lobbying, force a voting system chance, and ban gerrymandering. Nothing else is going to beat the corporate government.
Not all of us live in ImaginationLand, unfortunately.
You've been attacking the Dems for this, but why do you believe the Republicans will do differently? Or were you talking about independent?
I don't believe repubs will be better. I just consider them two parts of a single flawed system.
By voting for either of them you support both parties.
Not sure if this is enlightened centrism or not but avoiding voting all together doesn't solve anything either because one of the 2 will be elected regardless.
In the US there are only 2 possible winners, a democrat or a republican. Not voting or voting 3rd party is the same as throwing your vote in the trash because of the way the US system works.
So your choice if you want to change something is to vote for the one that has the highest chance of working towards your goals, and that is a democrat, even if almost everything they currently do is awful. Because if a republican wins, your concerns aren't even going to get into ear reach of them.
Either participate and vote to try to change something or accept that you're discarding your already limited political power by taking this moral stance, and in the process also making the problems you're concerned about worse.
What if all the people chanting better than trump voted independent?
What if you guys did something other than the same thing we always do?
Voting blue is not voting for change its voting for "not worse". And even then it will still get worse under dems You're defending this system by continuing to buy into it.
I voted blue every time I voted, and we still have genocide supply. Its unacceptable, and thus I will not accept it.
Have fun being a genocide apologist.
Team A wins: genocide Team B wins: genocide
Vote A, B, or neither?
Vote A: Team A or B wins. Still genocide.
Vote B: Team A or B wins. Still genocide.
Vote neither: Team A or B wins. Still genocide.
By not voting, or voting third party, the outcome is still genocide. You're still a part of the system.
By telling us how bad it is to vote because of this, you're ignoring every other issue. Some of them human rights.
Congrats, you're making the USA a worse place.
Voting for one of them is our only choice if we wish to influence the course of our country.
Trump would dump multiple times the amount of money Biden is into Israel, and he'd pivot us to backing Russia in the extermination of Ukraine. Assuming he doesn't start another genocide himself, he will absolutely make the situation worse.
Biden may have no shame, but Trump is constantly talking about doing even worse. Pretending risking him in office would be better is a dangerous delusion.
The problem with the trump administration is that people picked him thinking they were making the same exact decision you're making, and look where it took us.
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I have voted in every major election since I was 18.
That includes 4 Presidential, and many local ones.
They have been playing the same "lesser of two evils" card since George w. Bush. And probably before.
You're a chump for thinking things will change by playing into the same trap.
This will be my 7th Presidential, and I have voted in every eligible local/state election.
You offer harsh criticism but no actual solutions, like you're still 20 years old and thinking the world will change if you just talk about it enough.
Republicans will always lie cheat and steal with zero concern for ethics or scrupulous moral considerations when it comes to undermining principles of democracy if it increases their wealth and power projections. Always.
Democrats will also do that, sometimes, but not always. Don't vote for evil, but don't let guaranteed evil ever get unfettered control of a flawed constitutional system built where evil cannot be stopped other than by extreme means involving violence and bloodshed. See slavery and what we had to go thru to ultimately eliminate it.
These two groups have a stranglehold on our politics and no amount of bullshitting is going to work around it. If people weren't smart enough to pick Sanders over Clinton in 2016, if people were'nt cognizant enough of the idea behind not supporting Clinton in the primary simply based on not allowing a few 'royal' styled families to maintain a grasp on the reigns of power, if We the People aren't rioting in the streets to maintain an open, independent, liberal democracy, why would you expect people be smart enough to engage a third party candidate?
You have to plan ahead instead of yelling about it the last goddamn minute (in terms of election timing, this is the last minute) if you ever plan to side step D vs R, you have to look ahead 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 years and laser focus on all elections on all positions including packing the court with ethical judges that aren't beholden to ludicrous legal think tank fronts acting as formal legal society clubs. But nobody has time for that much less the will to create a set of policies that will garner support of a large enough swath of voters that it could affect the sweeping change you want so bad (and yes, that we all probably need).
At this point, unfortunately, you're a chump for thinking things will change by playing into the same trap of voting third party against the two parties holding all the cards.
Ahh yes there it is. I'm an angry youngster.
What if 10 12 years ago we all started voting independent? I think that would have a big impact.
In fact I think if we did that work years ago, we would have a healthy 3rd party candidate now.
But instead we keep doing the same things we always do..... Vote blue or else!!!!!
The greater of two evils won in 2016. If you saw no difference between the Trump and Biden presidency, you're a privileged person with the luxury to worry about genocide in another country more than what will happen to you.
I am a privelged person, I don't live in a country being genocided rn. And apparently so are you.
To me It doesn't matter if its happening in another country. I personally feel You are a coward to down play this genocide simply because its not happening in your back yard.
You got more immediate problems? Ok. Trump is gonna do bad shit? Almost certainly.
But Biden is not the solution to the problems in america. Dems will not bring about real change. They will only allow for a future republican candidate, with better PR, to take hold.
They are worthless. And your support of them only amounts to the same flawed choice, and the same outcomes already have.
Finally answer me this:What if everyone telling me too vote lesser of two evils, voted independent?
It's because of people like you letting them get away with being the lesser of the evils. If Dems were an overwhelming majority they couldn't campaign on how close they are to losing everything.
I was a Republican and have voted the same number of times you have. Republicans fucking joke about people like you allowing them to win.
Donald would send significantly more funds for that genocide and would help Russia with their genocide in the Ukraine. So doing some basic room temperature IQ thinking I'm going to pick the less genocidal option.
The USA is going to back a genocide regardless of your opinions. Learn how dirty your hands are and then make decisions that lessen the dirt in the future rather than digging straight into the shittiest option by trying to appear righteous.
And you think the Dems don't? Don't mistake pandering for genuine concern.
Ah yes, the obligatory "the other guy is worse" post. We know the other guy is worse. That doesn't mean democrats shouldn't pick better candidates.
Well besides being old he's not really doing so bad tbh. Who else would you put up for election? Jon Stewart?